While a film like Life after Death problematizes the official historical media memory and thus the creation of national identity in Rwanda, a handful of documentaries and a television series go further and tip over the edge, landing in a gray area where they can be perceived as revisionist.

Historical revisionism is often associated with the Holocaust, more specifically with Holocaust denial. While Holocaust denial certainly can be positioned within a black-or-white area, historical revisionism in general falls more within a gray area. French historian Henry Rousso coined the term “Historical negationism” in a study of the Vichy regime in order to be able to distinguish between historical revisionism and plain denial. He argues that the former usually refers to “a normal phase in the evolution of historical scholarship,” while denial of the Holocaust, “is a system of thought, an ideology, and not a scientific or even critical approach of the subject.”

As described in Chapter 3, a few documentaries produced in the aftermath of the genocide, for instance Hand of God, Hand of the Devil (1995), Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold (1996), and Blodsarvet (1995), with their strong focus on “innocent” Hutu refugees and Hutu prisoners as “equal” victims, paved the way for an alternative historical media memory of the genocide against the Tutsi—that of the double genocide. This early approach had logistical reasons since the refugees were easier for journalists to access at that time, but as this study overwhelmingly has demonstrated, this alternative perspective was not developed in film and television. The alternative or rather revisionist historical memory of a double genocide was instead foremost upheld by Hutu rebel groups such as Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), and it would take some twenty years before a type of historical negationism entered media production on the genocide, partly based on the theory of the double genocide.

The theory of the “double genoIide” is that the Tutsi minority, led by the RPF, carried out a so-called counter-genocide on the Hutu majority group during and directly after the recognized genocide against the Tutsi between April and July 1994, which was followed by military action against refugee camps across the border in Zaire in 1995–1996.